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Wedding Savings

Planning a wedding has really gone up to the next phase and a lot of brides find that it is much easier and much organized to create a beautiful wedding ever than before. There are so many great ways to save and one in particular that couples can do is with the use of electronic or online wedding invitations.

Don’t worry because you are not going to break tradition when you send such electronic types of invitations or e-vites. In a way, you are also helping in conserving paper while allowing couples to save from their usual wedding expenses. It is not uncommon to find more and more brides choosing online wedding invitations than the traditional ones. Although there are still some folks who prefer the traditional paper based invitations. But, with more and more people relying on technology as it is already part of their day to day activities receiving modern types of invitations are now accepted with amusement and excitement.

Here are some great reasons why online wedding invitations are trending:

1. Save Cost. This is mostly important for brides and grooms who wish to save more on their invites. Do not worry because most of your guests will understand if you want to save more so that you can pay more for better food, better music, a better honeymoon, or just want to save for that new house. Couples can easily choose the design of their invitation and send them through their email addresses. There is no need to pay for postal fees and stationery, and you can help Mother Earth in the process.

2. Total Control. Once you have found the right tools and website to create your electronic invites, you will be given total control over the invitation wordings, heading, format, layout and font typeface, and you can also choose the design that you want. Almost all the websites that offer these invitations will let you choose between logos, templates, graphics and designs.

You can include your pictures and other images to use for the wedding. And, if you are going to have a casual beach wedding, your invitation can be created with white sand beaches and sunsets as its background. If you are going to have a formal wedding, you can choose royal scroll headers with crumpled blue silk for its background. The choices are yours and it is endless.

3. Faster Reply. Once you have sent your invitations, you can expect a faster response time from guests. There is no need for you to wait for your guests to receive their invitations and there is no need to wait more for them to mail back. Your guests can easily inform you right away whether they are coming or not. So, even if you send them invitations at a later date, you will still be able to know right away if they are coming or not.

4. Better Structuring. With the use of online invitations, you will be able to keep track of which invitations you have already sent, who will and will not be attending. Websites can provide a web form that can categorize the responses from guests and can tell you who did and did not RSVP. You can even include your guests meal preferences that can automatically become a spreadsheet to easily hand over your caterers.

5. You Can Reach Everyone. While the postal service can deliver all your mails without a problem, there might still be a case of your invitations going somewhere. It is still not impossible to think that one or more, or a whole bunch of envelopes will get misplaced. Your out-of-town guests can be assured that they will be receiving your e-vites right away. An e-vite system will let you change your settings to be notified if an invitation has already been opened. This way, you are certain that every guest received their invitations.

With the advantages of receiving these techie invitations, there are still some who are in doubt with their growing popularity.

Here are some of the reasons:

Electronic invites are not refined. Either because the screen is not as pretty as paper or because email is not as refined as the postal service. But, think of it this way, you usually receive solicitations, garnish circulars, and reminders from your dentist through your snail-mail. When you receive a beautiful envelope created by a calligrapher, we mostly acknowledge that it stands out. Why not, think of e-vites as also an invitation that your friend took their time in preparing and sending so you can appreciate it better.

Electronic invites are ugly. Some may think these invites are ugly because there are so many websites offering them. However, there are so many great online invitation sites that can provide more stylish designs with more thoughtful user interface. The goal of these sites is to create invitations that can evoke the same feeling of providing an elegant letterpress card you commonly receive in your snail-mailbox.

Not wanting to change. Brides are mostly in love with stationery and some would totally avoid the change e-vites can bring. Some grooms can also hinder brides from creating their own-evites especially if they consider those who do not have their own email addresses or are just not usually online. However, there are a lot of sites that can help in creating traditional wedding invites and online wedding invitations. You can send some traditional invitation to guests you think will be more comfortable in receiving such invites, and create more e-vites to send to your guests.

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Your wedding is a one-time event that is why you’d want to invite the most important people in your lives to witness it. Here come the wedding invitations that you need to send out to your guests weeks before the wedding.

Should You Buy Invites or DIY?

First, you need to decide whether to buy the wedding invitations or make them yourself. Think about the following things so you can come up with a good decision:

Think about your creativity. Are you confident that you can come up with good designs that will not only please the guests but also show your personalities as a couple?

Are you fond of hand crafting?

Do you have people who can help you out in making the invites?

Can you design the invites yourself?

Do you have a very limited budget for the invitations?

Do you want to save money for the wedding?

If you answered yes to all the questions above, then it would be better if you make your own wedding invitations. If not, then it would be a mess and may be a cause of arguments if you continue with DIY. It wouldn’t help your wedding if your relationship gets shaken up by making the wedding invites alone. However, a DIY wedding invitation project that is carried out successfully would save you 30% to 40% of your invites budget.

Moreover, the invitations might cost you a lot due to the rising prices of stationery. You can save more money if you just have the right computer software and colored printer. Wedding invitation designs can be found online. You can download them along with the appropriate fonts and then print them into some special paper. There are even DIY kits from various wedding shops. A little creativity, time and effort would help you finish your personalized wedding invitations.

Tips on Handling Your DIY Wedding Invitations

Making wedding invitations is time consuming, especially if you have a lot of people in your guest list. You might be overwhelmed by the task, but the following tips can help:

Allot a lot of time from designing to mailing the invitations. It can be a very time consuming task so you have to give an allowance of about two months, or at least one more month added to your estimated time frame. This is enough time for you to make up for your mistakes in the early part of creating the invites. Don’t forget that they should be mailed six to eight weeks before the big day, enough time for the guests to send their response as to whether they are attending your wedding or not.

Consider the reply date carefully. Kindly ask your guests to reply to the invites two to three weeks before the wedding. This can provide you the time you need to put the seating arrangement in order, if you have one.

Choose a card size depending on the envelopes that are readily available. It is a common mistake to start making invitations only to find out later that they wouldn’t fit into envelopes of your preferred size and color. Gather your materials first before starting on the project.

Be careful with the dimensions. Make invitations that are at least a quarter or half an inch smaller than the envelopes. Make them even smaller if you plan to put inserts inside the envelope.

Write the invitation properly. Don’t entrust everything to the fonts and colors to make your invites beautiful. Choose the right words as well. Instead of writing “two thousand and thirteen,” put in “two thousand thirteen” for the year. Stop abbreviating words so for “5th Avenue” write “Fifth Avenue.”

Be polite and keep the registry information off the invitation. Your guests who lean towards being more traditional might not like it and might even say no to your invitation. Instead, let the information about registries be spread around through word-of-mouth with the help of your parents and friends more involved in the wedding. It’s more polite this way.

Try the design on actual paper first. It’s a different thing to just look at the design on the computer than to have it printed as draft. This is how you’ll notice a font that is smaller or larger than how you want it to be or script that is not as readable as you think it is.

Keep proofreading. Don’t be contented with a simple spell check. Get help from other people because they might notice mistakes that you didn’t see yourself.

Weigh the invites first. This determines how much postage you should buy. Consider how square envelopes need higher postage than the rectangular ones.

Engage in trial delivery of your invitation. Send one to yourself to see whether your invitations will still be received by your guests in a single decent piece.

These pointers should help you amass the courage that you need to finally send the wedding invitations. At least you’ll know where to start and how to deal with it with less stress.

The reception is where you can prove you can handle your guests well. This is where your skills in planning mostly go to, as the flow of the reception is fully in your control. In fact, roughly 30% of a wedding budget goes to food alone. With such a huge chunk out of the budget, food should be especially planned and carefully picked to save for other wedding uses while maintaining quality and taste. If you want to save on your wedding catering, here are some tips to help you set the wedding budget straight to saving mode.

Plan Your Food Servings

When we talk of weddings, the normative setting would be a formal dinner wedding. It’s elegant, simple and formal; pretty much the easy way out of the hazy and hectic planning process. While it’s a good, no-fail option, guests would usually look for unique and interesting weddings every now and then. This is where your creative thinking should come in.

Deviate from standard wedding dinner parties when you can. They cost more than any other food choices. People tend to eat more during the night than in the day, and in dinner you usually serve steak and a rigid three-course meal. If you hold the reception during the day, you can make the wedding early morning so the reception can coincide with a brunch or a lunch. By then you can serve light meals like salads or sandwiches.

You should also choose how you would serve your meal to the guests. Usually it’s a buffet we’re thinking when we talk about weddings. However, buffets can also cost more. Apparently, the volume of food requested makes it look like a good deal, but you also have to consider the wait staff and the whole catering service in general. If you want to save up on buffets, try to serve light meals as the example above shows. You can save on food while other expenses follow through. If you want to strictly work within your means, you can serve meal by plated meals. This means serving the food to the guests while they are seated. They don’t have to stand up like in buffets. This would make you consider only who’s on the guest list. It means no worries for leftover foods. You can also get stations, but they tend to be expensive.

While this tip may not exactly save you wedding money, you should also consider appetite sensitivities from your guests like allergies or vegans. To be sure, include one in your menu that would appeal to almost every guest’s health concerns as well.

Think of More Creative Food Choices

As we’ve given as an example a while ago, you can serve light foods like salads or sandwiches for the reception. It all depends on the time that you would serve the reception dish. The more late it gets in the day, the more you’d be obliged to serve expensive dinner meals, especially in a formal setting. If you extract your creative juices enough, you can come up with creative food solutions that can help you save up on your wedding food catering.

Many food trucks are getting hired nowadays in different functions and events. It’s also a good idea to get one for your wedding, especially if your wedding theme is not that formal. You can get tacos or crepe trucks, depending which is available and which one you’d get for your wedding. You can also have pizza for a reception, where guests can mix and match their own recipes and have a standby oven for them to bake their pizzas for a while. Burgers can also be used instead of pizzas so they can instantly eat the food.

If you’re doing an early morning wedding ceremony, you may just have a breakfast reception. Breakfasts are never three-course meals. You basically need free-flowing coffee and available bread, and hit on some breakfast food choices like the all-American bacon and omelette among others. Experiment with Asian infusion such as stir fry or noodles. For late afternoon, you can prepare hors d’oeuvres and pass it on along the reception with some light foodstuffs on the side.

drinks are also an important part of the reception. Therefore, you need to choose between a wine bar or serving of wine and beer per hour – as the average drink guests must drink per hour is one glass of wine. You can choose whichever is cheaper. Be careful of deciding on this with kids on the guest list, though.

Talk to the Caterer

If you’re still not sure of what to make out of your wedding catering, you can approach your caterer. They can give you some ideas not only food but also on the tables and the seating. If you would rent a caterer for your wedding, be sure to pick one that you can definitely pay for. You can ask for a food sampling to ascertain the quality and taste of the caterer that you would rent for your wedding.

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